The Magnetic North eBook

But never in all that weary march did it manifest
again any such modest alacrity. If, thereafter,
in the long going “up river” there came
an interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults
in the air, wound its forward or backward rope round
willow scrub or alder, or else advanced precipitately
with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to attack
its master in the shins. It either held back with
a power superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum
that capsized its weary conductor. Its manners
grew steadily worse as the travellers pushed farther
and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising
power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences
of Christian hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even
beyond Tischsocket, the last of the Indian villages
for a hundred miles.

The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper
they had seen common in men’s dealings up here
in the North, began to realize that all other trials
of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the
Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while
something goes wrong with the nerves. The huge
drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt, something
to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen,
sometimes seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were
ill-fed, suffering from exposure, intense cold, and
a haunting uncertainty of the end of the undertaking.
They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect
for each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves,
when you are suffering the agonies of snow-blindness,
sore feet, and the pangs of hunger, you are not, to
put it mildly, at your best as a member of the social
order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed
to remember, but both men grew carefuller at crucial
moments, and the talkative one more silent as time
went on.

By the rule of the day the hard shift before dinner
usually fell to the Boy. It was the worst time
in the twenty-four hours, and equally dreaded by both
men. It was only the first night out from Anvik,
after an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping
heavily ahead, bent like an old man before the cutting
sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands behind back,
rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow
and sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened
his back, and remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable
terms, for putting off the halt later than ever they
had yet, “after such a day.”

“Can’t make fire with green cotton-wood,”
was the Colonel’s rejoiner.

“Then let’s stop and rest, anyhow.”

“Nuh! We know where that would land us.
Men who stop to rest, go to sleep in the snow, and
men who go to sleep in the snow on empty stomachs
don’t wake up.”